"Modern Folk Music at its Most Hauntingly Beautiful"

Trumptation Blues

“South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” – James L. Petigru, former South Carolina Attorney General, 1860

As the 2016 presidential campaigns got going and professional loudmouth Donald Trump achieved “frontrunner status” among the field of GOP candidates, I had visions of the “anyone but Romney” jockeying that went down in 2012 quickly unseating Trump from the top of the field.

But then I realized, it’s a two-headed monster the GOP created, and the Bernie Sanders candidacy is the other head. I like Bernie the independent senator. He was one of the first five people I ever followed on Twitter. I don’t know if he would make a great president, but he represents, essentially, all of the things that the GOP accused Obama of being (except, of course, a Kenyan). Where they accused Obama of being an un-Christian socialist, Bernie really is one. And an unapologetic one. The comparisons go beyond that, but the point is that the hard right has built a bunker behind the anti-Obama, and the hard left has built one behind the ultra-Obama.

Look, all I know is that Trump’s ascendancy doesn’t say bad things about Donald Trump. He’s a cartoon. But it says terrible things about Americans. That almost 35% of South Carolinians think this dickhead represents what America needs is a slap in the face to every single person who has ever taken even the smallest action in favor of living up to the promise of America as set forth in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”

I get it. We’ve done a bad job from the start at living that truth. But we’ve made progress. And Donald Trump represents regression away from that ideal in every possible sense.

On election night in 2012, by an accident of the calendar, I was playing a solo set in Hollywood. I’ve never shared this video before, but on that night I closed my set with “This Land is Your Land.” Incidentally, Woody Guthrie hated Donald Trump’s father. I’ll leave that here…